On their way out of town for the August recess, House Republicans had a parting gift for President Barack Obama - subpoenas.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), issued a subpoena on Friday to the Treasury Department for hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, including any communications between the White House and IRS or Treasury Department on the effort.

On Thursday, Issa sent two subpoenas to the State Department for information related to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Four Americans died in that incident, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens.

Issa gave the State and Treasury departments until Aug. 16 to respond to his subpoenas.

And Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the Science, Space and Technology Committee, issued the panel’s first subpoena in more than two decades as part of its probe into the “secret science” behind the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clear Air Act regulations.

While Obama and White House officials have dismissed the IRS controversy as a “phony scandal” because progressive groups were also targeted by the agency, House Republicans - and the Senate Finance Committee - have continued to press for more information. Issa’s panel has gotten only a fraction of the more than 600,000 pages of documents IRS officials initially identified as related to the scandal, including e-mails and other communications from agency employees involved in screening applications for non-profit status by conservative organizations.

The Benghazi controversy is not going away anytime soon either. Issa’s panel has already received access to 25,000 pages of Benghazi documents from the State Department. Yet these documents are carted into and out of the Capitol each day, and congressional investigators are not allowed to retain them. Since May, Issa has issued four document subpoenas to the State Dept. seeking additional information, with more subpoenas seeking testimony from department officials.

“After ignoring requests for months, the State Department has left no alternative but to issue subpoenas for documents relevant to our investigation,” Issa said Thursday. “State Department tactics to delay and impede accountability have exhausted the Committee’s patience. Further subpoenas may also be necessary if the Department is not forthcoming on other requests.”

Issa’s committee is already involved in a legal battle with the Justice Department over the Fast and Furious scandal, in which thousands of U.S.-made guns were allowed to “walk” to Mexican drug cartels as part of a botched investigation into weapons trafficking. Following a lengthy battle with Obama administration, the House approved civil and criminal contempt resolutions against Attorney General Eric Holder for failing to comply with an OGR subpoena issued as part of the probe. The Justice Department refused to enforce the criminal contempt resolution against Holder. The House committee then sued the Justice Department in Aug. 2012 in federal court to enforce the civil contempt resolution. That case is still pending.

Issa, a strident Obama critic, complained in a Friday letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew that the IRS has “engaged in a systematic effort to delay, frustrate, impede, and obstruct the Committee’s investigation.”

“Your speed of delivery is such that you will be long gone, the president will be long gone, Lois Lerner will be retired before we would have received a sufficient amount of information to be meaningful,” Issa told IRS Acting Director Danny Werfel at Friday’s OGR hearing to approve the subpoena.

Werfel countered that the IRS has made 70,000 pages of documents available to the committee, with more than 70 IRS lawyers working on processing the information requests by Congress.

“We operate within legal constraints of what we can deliver to who and when — we have to protect taxpayer information,” said Werfel. “The notion that we’re impending or obstructing is completely false.”

Smith complained that the Science Committee - which he took over in January - has unsuccessfully sought information from EPA since Sept. 2011 outlining how it determines allowable levels of airborne pollutants.

“This subpoena could have been avoided,” Smith said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we’ve been put in this position by an agency that willfully disregards congressional requests and makes its rules using undisclosed data. After two years of failing to respond, it’s clear that the EPA is not going to give the American people what they deserve—the truth about regulations.”

Smith is demanding that EPA turn over by Aug. 19 unreleased public health studies conducted by Harvard University and the American Cancer Society. EPA used the studies developing regulations on particulate matter and ozone.

Democrats on the Science Committee mocked the GOP’s efforts, saying they we clearly done at the behest of special-interest groups.

“I have to assume you’ll be passing this data to, excuse my language, industry hacks,” said Rep Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), ranking member of the Science panel. “To so blatantly be doing the bidding of polluting industries is simply mind-boggling.”